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Medieval Mindset
Caterina by Moonlight follows a five-year-old girl who is abandoned at a convent, forced to marry at fourteen, and learns to navigate power, love, and loss to claim a life that finally feels like her own. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I visited Florence for the first time in Oct 2019, and fell deeply in love with their city, the Medici, and Botticelli. When I got home, the characters dictated the book to me, and I spent the entire pandemic in the later 15th century with them.
Caterina’s voice evolves from innocence to sharp awareness. Why was it important to keep the narrative grounded in Caterina’s perceptions rather than broader historical commentary?
I think a reader learns more when they have a direct, first-hand experience through a character’s eyes. By immersion in Caterina’s experiences, one will hopefully be drawn into her emotions and her evolution, and absorb the actual history of the times by osmosis. Her transition from the medieval mindset (all is God’s will, and we must accept our lot and suffer in silence, and hope for reward in heaven after death) to the Renaissance expansion of mankind’s possibilities, the growth of humanism and secular accomplishment, and the ability to reinvent oneself, while enjoying creativity, beauty, music, and art. It is a struggle we still see today, between fundamentalism and progressive humanism.
The novel repeatedly asks what kind of life a woman can build within imposed limits. How did you explore that tension between restriction and self-determination?
Caterina is only exposed to church doctrine for the first decade of her life but finds it frustrating that the answer to all her questions is “Because it’s God’s will.” It is her friend, Lucretia, who first leads her to taste the outside world, who struggles against the restrictions of the time, and who helps expand her world. Lucretia is very clever when it comes to navigating the rules and living a full life. Even Botticelli, who paints Caterina as a muse, questions his own desire to paint other than religious-themed work, wondering if he will be damned for it. Caterina grows throughout the book and learns how to protect and assert herself, despite the imposed limitations of the era.
What do you hope readers take away about resilience, joy, and self-creation?
That we have the unlimited capacity for re-invention – to make the most of our lives, and that ultimately, love is the fabric of the universe that binds us together.
Author Links: Facebook | Website | The Renaissance Woman
Caterina by Moonlight
Caterina by Moonlight is a historical novel that feels most alive when it stays close to Caterina’s own senses: the smell of herbs in the convent infirmary, the shimmer of painted robes, the noise of Florence’s streets, and the constant pull between obedience and curiosity. The book begins with a child being left at Le Murate and grows outward from that wound, following her into marriage, court life, political violence, travel, and eventual self-possession. What struck me most is that this isn’t just a Renaissance backdrop with costumes pinned onto it. It’s a coming-of-age story built out of religion, class, art, gender, and survival. From the start, the novel gives Caterina a clear emotional center, and that makes the long historical sweep easy to stay inside.
What the book does especially well is make Renaissance Florence feel inhabited rather than displayed. Author Kim Gottlieb-Walker fills the novel with workshops, convent routines, carnival songs, court spectacles, paintings, bargaining, spices, horses, manuscripts, and public ceremony. The detail rarely reads like research being shown off for its own sake. Instead, it becomes the medium through which Caterina understands the world. A tiny moment like the market pastry, when “It tasted like heaven,” says a lot about the novel’s method: history arrives through appetite, wonder, and bodily experience, not through lecture. That grounded sensory approach gives the book a warm pulse even when the plot turns dark.
Caterina herself is the reason the novel holds together over so many years and events. As a narrator, she begins with a child’s literal-minded innocence, then gradually becomes sharper, sadder, more observant, and more self-directed. The best parts of the book come from watching her mind at work as she absorbs contradictory lessons about holiness, beauty, marriage, desire, and duty. She doesn’t arrive as a ready-made heroine. She becomes one by learning how power actually works, then finding ways to move within it. That development gives the novel its shape. Even when the story leans into romance or court intrigue, it still feels like Caterina’s education in how to live inside her era without surrendering her inner life.
The novel is also deeply interested in women’s lives as networks of constraint, improvisation, and mutual recognition. Convent women, noblewomen, servants, mothers, lovers, and widows all occupy the book differently, and the story pays attention to the bargains each of them has to make. That gives the narrative some real heft. The historical figures and events, from Medici politics to foreign courts, matter here, but they matter because of how they shape private lives. By the time the book reaches its final movement, it has become a story not only about one woman’s endurance, but about how intelligence, memory, and affection can slowly create a life that feels chosen. When Matteo says, “Here begins a new life,” the line lands because the novel has earned it through hundreds of pages of loss, risk, and persistence.
Caterina by Moonlight is an immersive, character-centered historical novel with a generous heart and a strong sense of place. It’s interested in art, faith, politics, love, and danger, but it keeps returning to the same central question: what kind of self can a woman build when so much of her life is arranged by others? The answer the book gives is hopeful without feeling flimsy. It believes that knowledge matters, that pleasure matters, that loyalty matters, and that a life can widen even after it’s been narrowed. I came away feeling that the novel’s real subject is not simply Renaissance Florence, but the making of a woman who learns to see the world clearly and still choose joy inside it.
Pages: 297
Lenswoman in Love – a novel of the 1960s & ’70s
Lenswoman in Love follows Maddy, a gifted young photographer coming of age in the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, as she moves through Berkeley activism, UCLA film culture, music scenes, political awakening, and an enduring, half-tormenting, half-sustaining love for Jake. What struck me most is that the novel isn’t just built around romance. It’s really about a sensibility forming under pressure: grief after her father’s death, the thrill of learning to see through a lens, the moral charge of documenting history, and the slow, uneven process of becoming herself. The early material alone gives that shape vividly, from Maddy filming police violence at an antiwar protest, to photographing the Free Speech Movement, to meeting Jake at her family’s folk club, where art, politics, and desire begin to tangle together in ways that define the rest of her life.
I liked the writing for its warmth and immediacy. Author Kim Gottlieb-Walker has a way of narrating feelings that is unabashedly romantic without becoming weightless. Maddy’s first attraction to Jake has that feverish, slightly humiliating intensity that actual young longing has. It’s not cleaned up for elegance. It blushes, stumbles, aches. I especially liked the scenes in which emotional awakening and artistic awakening mirror each other: the moment Jake opens her ears to electric music after she dismisses it as unserious, the candlelit Bob Dylan sighting, the way she notices faces, light, posture, gesture before she fully knows what any of it means. Those moments make the book feel less like a conventional love story than a record of consciousness being sharpened. The prose can be earnest, and at times that earnestness edges close to old-fashioned, but in this case, I found that more affecting than limiting.
I was more interested in the book’s ideas than in its romance, which is saying something because Jake is very skillfully drawn as a formative figure. The novel keeps circling back to a tension that feels genuinely alive: how a woman can be swept up in love without surrendering the self she is still building. Maddy’s mother gives some of the book’s wisest emotional counterweight when she insists that women don’t need men to be complete and warns her daughter not to kiss every clever frog. That note matters because the novel is clearly fascinated by longing, but it doesn’t finally confuse longing with fulfillment. I also admired the way politics are woven into the fabric of personal memory rather than pinned on as historical decoration. Andy Goodman’s murder, the antiwar marches, the police brutality, the sense that art can bear witness, all of that gives the book a pulse beyond nostalgia. I think the novel’s closeness to lived experience is both its strength. It produces texture, conviction, and vivid social detail.
Lenswoman in Love is appealing because it knows that youth is rarely one clean story. It’s heartbreak and glamour, self-invention and confusion, politics and vanity, courage and naivete, all happening at once. I came away feeling that the novel’s real subject is not simply whether Maddy and Jake belong together, but how a woman learns to trust her eye, her appetite, and her own unfolding life. I’d recommend it especially to readers who enjoy coming-of-age fiction, artist-novels, and period stories that care as much about atmosphere and inner weather as plot. It’s a tender, intelligent book for anyone who has ever fallen in love while trying, at the same time, to become a person.
Pages: 320 | ISBN : 978-1916966833
